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Wednesday, August 29, 2012

HBR calls into question the commonly accepted belief that customers want relationships with brands. They don't. It goes on to point out that what customers seek is a sense of shared values.

That's why I've embraced a brand planning model based on the power of empathy.

As I've written previously, I believe that the way in which we form brand relationships mirrors how we form personal relationships. Forces such as empathy, experiences, energy and endorsement help form our real life relationships.

Empathy tends to be the basis of our strongest and lasting personal relationships. We connect with people who share our values, sense of style, even our sense of humor. This holds true with brands. Brand empathy occurs when customers project onto your brand their own attitudes and values.

Like people, brands are judged by what they do, not just by what they say. We tend to believe something after we've experienced it first hand. In marketing, well orchestrated brand experiences help turn perceptions into beliefs when customers sense a brands words and actions are in sync.

Monday, August 13, 2012

I've been in conversations lately in which people predict that social media will prove to be a marketing folly – a waste of time and money better spent in other channels.

This may or not be true. I don't know. I'm not sure even the great 16th Century seer could give us guidance.

However, I do believe that the way in which we'll use this medium in the future will be very different than how we're using it today. It will evolve in ways we cannot yet see, and in doing so will become more useful for marketers.

Why do I believe this? Sometimes the past can give us a clue to the future.

Back in the late '90s, and even in the early 2000s, the way in which agencies and marketers used the web bears no resemblance to the way in which we're using it today. First of all, dial-up was the dominant access method, so it was unrealistic to use rich images and long-form video (the dominant form of interactive marketing today). Second, we were very inexperienced in this new medium, so we treated the web as a one-way, broadcast version of a brochure.

Back in the 2000s, there were breathless predictions about the advent of interactive television. The battle for control over this new form of marketing was being defined by the set-top box – the source of viewer interaction. Or so we thought, until recently when we began witnessing the emergence of "second-screen" viewing, in which viewers interact with broadcast content through a smartphone, tablet or laptop.

In the case of the web, we couldn't see a near future in which broadband would change the online experience, and how the web would evolve from a broadcast medium into a service channel. And as for interactive television, we didn't see the iPhone coming.

The moral of the story is that we should not define a medium's future potential based on our current practices and the current state of its technology.

So will social media evolve into a powerful marketing platform? Probably. But not in the form in which it exists today. Savvy agencies and marketers will test, learn and be ready for what comes next.